Don’t Get Too Old

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In my second semester of graduate school, I found myself weighted by a somnambulant, stifling depression. I’d lived with depression since I was a child, and although I called my new symptoms by old familiar names, they felt different. My depression hummed with the low warning of an electrified wire and it felt just as likely to awaken, suddenly, dangerous. 

I was also planning my wedding, at the time.

This is the first thing I want to tell you about my experience of mental illness:

Obsession functions as an endless recursion, a tautology of actions. The object of obsession is both the stuff of madness and the only imaginable cure. There are some things you do out of both conscious desire and unwitting, unstoppable reflex. You simultaneously choose to act and have no choice.

The object of obsession/the action it demands, the emotional/the material, the reasonable/the unreasonable — 

compulsion blurs and severs these boundaries. 

The DSM-5 files this experience under a number: 300.3.

But it is also called by so many other words: Desire. Nostalgia. Yearning. Missing. Grieving. 

It is the fear, and the acknowledgement of the fact, that there is no such thing as permanence.

it is the endless terror of letting go, of forgetting. Of the smallest risk of forgetting.

Forgive me if this doesn’t make sense. I have been struggling for twenty years, now, to find sufficient words. 

But back to that spring in Philadelphia—

I needed to receive something from the outer world, to remind myself what was real. I also needed to plan my fucking wedding.

So I started collecting postcards, buying them on eBay by the hundreds, sorting them, inspecting their corners and postmarks and smudged once-words, clinging tightly to this proof that there truly were places, that there truly were pasts. 

Somehow I transformed these postcards into Save the Dates, trying to muster the care with which I’d once imagined crafting the material Stuff of my wedding. 

(My wedding. Our wedding? I realize that the detachment in these words elides Crys, for now. Don’t worry. We are married and we are thriving. But the point is that, in a spring that should have felt in every way like a beginning, I knew only a boundless isolation that even Crys’s fierce love for me could not pierce.)

I remember flipping past this postcard for the first time, one of many that I was idly sorting into used and unused. I parsed the words more quickly than I could register why my eye was drawn to them. The white space, the paper unevenly aged; the lack of address, of stamp, of postmark. A phrase in English when I had been skimming through German and French and Polish. Sudden meaning, unmediated by translation. 

It’s not uncommon to find old postcards canceled with a heavy hand. Each cancellation mark on a picture postcard holds so much within a smudge. It represents a collision between leisure and labor. It’s the index of a silent figure placed between sender and recipient. An intimate, yet anonymous, triangulation upon which, a hundred years later, you can intrude. 

It’s also common to find blank, pristine postcards that were collected in albums, and in this way have been rendered mute.

But this card, instead. It merely hinted at the possibility of a narrative. Was it written but never sent? Was it tucked inside a book, a gift perhaps, and forgotten?

Was it written to me?

(Of course not, but for that snap moment of linguistic recognition, it felt like a possibility.)

The sentiment is simple enough — a young girl has a birthday, maybe, and the adults who love her can’t untangle the mourning of their youth from the joy in her growth. It is their loss and regret that make room for her to grow. 

This is a lot to place on a small, female body. At once a platitude and a sinister wish. 

Don’t get too old.

It’s a common experience among the queers and mad folks I have known, to never imagine ourselves becoming elderly. An avoidance, yes, but also a practical understanding of the brevity of our lives. Statistically. 

Which is to say, I read this postcard like a memento mori. I received it as an omen.

For much of my life, objects have called to me, demanding, accumulating, insistent. When I was sixteen, a doctor observed this call and response and gave it a different twinned name: obsession and compulsion. My mind’s unrelenting drive to put the world in order was now, itself, officially coded as disorder. 

(I later learned that obsessively putting objects in order, when deemed useful and productive to society, can be called curatorial work or collection management.)

Until a few years ago, I could walk with ease; now I use a wheelchair. My position in the world has changed, physically and materially, in relation to the objects around me. I am dependent on objects, on tools, to accomplish tasks others do easily.

I thought, once, that I would work furiously for the short years I’d be given, that I would choose a short firecracker of a life over one that was long and small, had I been given the choice. But my relationship to time, too, has changed. I can no longer work with the furious intensity I once savored, romanticized, considered my imperfect but essential praxis. My once whip-quick mind now requires my own patience. I am relearning how to think, now. I am relearning how to remember. I am ready, finally, perhaps, to be comfortable with all that I will forget.

Or, in other words,

(because I will never be able to stop repeating and reworking all that I do, so there must be more than one choice of words here, an editorial refusal)

I am finding new ways to account and collect and experience time. If necessary, I will invent them.